Definition:
A theory of grammar that accounts for the constructions of a language by linguistic transformations and phrase structures. See also:
Observations:
- "The new linguistics, which began in 1957 with the publication of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, deserves the label 'revolutionary.' After 1957, the study of grammar would no longer be limited to what is said and how it is interpreted. In fact, the word grammar itself took on a new meaning. The new linguistics defined grammar as our innate, subconscious ability to generate language, an internal system of rules that constitutes our human language capacity. The goal of the new linguistics was to describe this internal grammar.
"Unlike the structuralists, whose goal was to examine the sentences we actually speak and to describe their systemic nature, the transformationalists wanted to unlock the secrets of language: to build a model of our internal rules, a model that would produce all of the grammatical--and no ungrammatical--sentences."
(Martha Kolln and Robert Funk, Understanding English Grammar. Allyn and Bacon, 1998) - "When it comes to syntax, [Noam] Chomsky is famous for proposing that beneath every sentence in the mind of a speaker is an invisible, inaudible deep structure, the interface to the mental lexicon. The deep structure is converted by transformational rules into a 'surface structure' that corresponds more closely to what is pronounced and heard. The rationale is that certain constructions, if they were listed in the mind as surface structures, would have to be multiplied out in thousands of redundant variations that would have to have been learned one by one, whereas if the constructions were listed as deep structures, they would be simple, few in number, and economically learned."
(Steven Pinker, Words and Rules. Basic Books, 1999)
Also Known As: transformational-generative grammar or T-G or TGG
